She tried to absorb his words, the whispering implications that underlay them. Part of her wanted to turn away, plug her ears, ignore what she was hearing. The other half was desperate for him to make it crystal clear, to tell her all at once, as brutally and honestly as he could.
“What do you mean, IbecameAngie?” she said coolly.
He shook his head and rubbed his brow hard.
“Dad, talk to me. That newspaper article said Angela Pallorino, aged four, died in a car accident in Tuscany. In eighty-four. You and Mom told me we had a car accident in Tuscany in eighty-six, thatIalmost died, and that’s where I got this scar. That’s whenIwas four going on five.” She pointed to her mouth. Her father looked away.
“Look at me, Dad.Thisscar.” Slowly, he turned his face back to hers. “Whodied?”
“Our first baby, our first child.”
She opened her mouth but couldn’t speak. Lurching to her feet, she marched to the window, spun back, stared at her father sitting by the fire, next to the Christmas tree. A tree just like the one in the photo of the three of them when they were supposed to have returned from Italy after the accident.
“Who am I?” she said quietly.
“I loved your mother. Iloveher so much. I ... it wasn’t wrong, Angie. What we did was not wrong. It just ... happened.”
Her insides shaking, she returned to the fire and reseated herself facing him. “Just tell me,” she said. “Just tell me in simple, chronological order. Bullet points if you must. I need to know. Whatever it is, it’s been making me sick. Because I have ... been having memories of things that don’t fit into what I thought was my own childhood.”
His shoulders rolled inward, and he nodded slowly. “My sabbatical was in eighty-four. The accident happened that year. Our four-year-old little Angie died in the hospital of injuries she sustained in that smash. Your mother suffered badly. Mentally. Terrible clinical depression. Then her hallucinations started. I tried. Everything. We came home to live in Vancouver, where she got good treatment. I took a position teaching at Simon Fraser University. But it was hard to leave her at home during the days. She was numb. Absent. Gone. Like part of her had died with Angie. It was when I took her to church that I began to find hope. She prayed for her lost child at church, and she seemed to liven up slightly, as if she’d found a contact again with her child. And the father there, Lord bless him, he got your mother volunteering and into singing again. She joined the Catholic church choir, and they often sang in the big cathedral in downtown Vancouver. Near the hospital.” He reached for his whiskey and finished it. He sat in silence for a few moments, as if gathering his energy for what he had to say next.
“It was Christmas Eve. Two years after Italy and the accident.”
Her mother’s strange words sifted into her mind as her father spoke:Christmas Eve she was returned. I was singing at the cathedral ... such a beautiful cathedral. It was ordained ...
“Next to the cathedral downtown is Saint Joseph’s Hospital. They have an Angel’s Cradle there,” he said. “It’s a Catholic-administered facility, and the hospital staff, together with the police, wanted to put an end to the practice of young, unwed, fearful mothers dumping newborns to die in places like public washrooms or dumpsters. So they came up with the idea of a safe place where these mothers could leave their newborns without criminal repercussions. And police agreed that they would not pursue the mothers of those infants left abandoned in this safe place. A cradle was constructed for this purpose, or that’s what they call it ...” He wavered.
“Go on, please,” she said quietly.
He cleared his throat and took in a deep breath. “The cradle itself is a tiny cubicle with a cot inside. It has a door at about waist level that opens onto the street. All a mother had to do was open the door in the street, right next to the hospital’s emergency exit, place her baby inside, and close the door. She could then leave. Within a few minutes an alarm would sound inside the hospital, and nurses would open the cubicle from another door on the inside. They’d find and treat the baby. The infant would then go into the system and be adopted out.”
The angels brought her back. They did. She didn’t belong there. They returned her ...
No. It couldn’t be.
She could not have been left in the cradle as a newborn—not possible. The timing did not work.
Her father reached for the bottle Angie had left on the side table, and he topped up his glass. Cupping it in his hands, he regarded the play of firelight on the contents.
“That Christmas Eve in eighty-six, while your mother was singing with the choir at the midnight Mass, some kind of violent gang fight erupted downtown, and it spilled down the street outside the church. From inside the cathedral, we heard gunshots, screaming, and tires screeching. Then nothing. When we came out, it was all quiet. So very quiet because it had started to snow. But we learned later through the media that the Angel’s Cradle alarm had sounded that night, close to midnight. And inside the cradle they’d found a young girl, around four years of age, bleeding profusely from a slash across her mouth.” He paused. “Knife wound, they thought. Associated with the gang fight.”
Her hand went slowly to her mouth.
Uciekaj, uciekaj! ... Wskakuj do srodka, szybko! ... Siedz cicho!
Run, run! Get inside!
“The child couldn’t speak,” he said. “Mute from shock, they thought. Then later, they wondered if you understood English—”
“Me?”
Emotion glittered in her father’s eyes. “Long red hair. You had no shoes. It waswinterand you had no shoes—just a little pink dress. Like a party frock, but old and torn and covered in blood.” He drank more. It seemed to ease the words for him as they got harder for her to hear.
“When the story finally ran in the paper, when the details started coming out, and when the police couldn’t find anyone related to you at all, you went into the system to be adopted out.”
She blinked, unable to fully absorb what he was saying. His words were slotting like jigsaw pieces into a full picture that explained things with harsh clarity. But at the same time they didn’t.
“It was a mystery, Ange. A case that went cold. But in the photos that your mother and I saw in the media, you lookedexactlylike our four-year-old Angie did when she was taken from us. The red hair. The right age. It was haunting, the fact that she—I mean, you—were found right outside the church where your mother was singing, where in her prayer she’d felt a link to you again—”
